Analytical Review of Audiovisual Systems for Determining Personal Protective Equipment on a Person's Face

• Published in: Informatika i avtomatizaciâ (Online) Vol. 20; no. 5; pp. 1116 - 1152
• Main Authors: Dvoynikova, Anastasia, Markitantov, Maxim, Ryumina, Elena, Ryumin, Dmitry, Karpov, Alexey
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 13.08.2021
• ISSN: 2713-3192; 2713-3206
• DOI: 10.15622/20.5.5

Since 2019 all countries of the world have faced the rapid spread of the pandemic caused by the COVID-19 coronavirus infection, the fight against which continues to the present day by the world community. Despite the obvious effectiveness of personal respiratory protection equipment against coronavirus infection, many people neglect the use of protective face masks in public places. Therefore, to control and timely identify violators of public health regulations, it is necessary to apply modern information technologies that will detect protective masks on people's faces using video and audio information. The article presents an analytical review of existing and developing intelligent information technologies for bimodal analysis of the voice and facial characteristics of a masked person. There are many studies on the topic of detecting masks from video images, and a significant number of cases containing images of faces both in and without masks obtained by various methods can also be found in the public access. Research and development aimed at detecting personal respiratory protection equipment by the acoustic characteristics of human speech is still quite small, since this direction began to develop only during the pandemic caused by the COVID-19 coronavirus infection. Existing systems allow to prevent the spread of coronavirus infection by recognizing the presence/absence of masks on the face, and these systems also help in remote diagnosis of COVID-19 by detecting the first symptoms of a viral infection by acoustic characteristics. However, to date, there is a number of unresolved problems in the field of automatic diagnosis of COVID-19 and the presence/absence of masks on people's faces. First of all, this is the low accuracy of detecting masks and coronavirus infection, which does not allow for performing automatic diagnosis without the presence of experts (medical personnel). Many systems are not able to operate in real time, which makes it impossible to control and monitor the wearing of protective masks in public places. Also, most of the existing systems cannot be built into a smartphone, so that users be able to diagnose the presence of coronavirus infection anywhere. Another major problem is the collection of data from patients infected with COVID-19, as many people do not agree to distribute confidential information.